Session Design

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.harmonica.chat/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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What is Session Design?

Session Design is a panel inside the session overview modal that surfaces every layer of the AI facilitator’s instructions in one place. From here you can read, edit, and version each layer — and switch the methodology template without starting over. To open it: on any session’s results page, click the session header or the settings icon to open the session overview modal, then select Session Design from the sidebar.

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The four prompt layers

The facilitator’s behavior emerges from four stacked layers. They are applied from outermost (most authoritative) to innermost (most specific):

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Platform Guidelines

This layer holds rules that govern the facilitator’s general behavior — tone, question framing, how it handles off-topic responses, and similar baseline guardrails. Harmonica ships a default set. You can extend or override it here for sessions where you need different defaults.

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Facilitation Approach

This is the most session-specific layer. It contains the instructions for how the facilitator should run this particular conversation — the methodology’s protocol, question sequences, and any custom rules you have added. When you apply a finding from the Review tab, it appends a new rule to this layer.

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Summary Generation

Controls how the facilitator synthesizes participant conversations into the session summary. Edit this when you want the summary to emphasize particular themes, use a specific structure, or omit certain kinds of content.

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Edit a prompt layer

Each editable layer is an accordion. Expand it to read the current content, then click Edit to open the inline editor. Make your changes and click Save. The change is recorded in the edit history for that layer.

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Switch the methodology template

The Template dropdown at the top of the Session Design panel shows the methodology currently applied to this session. To switch to a different methodology:

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Cross-Pollination snap

When switching templates, you can optionally enable the Cross-Pollination snap. This attaches a snapshot of the session’s current scratchpad themes — topics and tensions the AI has surfaced from prior conversations — as context for the recompose. The new facilitation prompt will be aware of what has already emerged from participants. This is useful mid-session when you want to shift methodology in response to what you have heard so far.

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Brief drift and regeneration

When you edit the session’s core brief fields (goal, critical information, context, topic), Harmonica detects that those fields have drifted from what was used to generate the current facilitation prompt. A banner appears on the session overview offering to regenerate. The regeneration cascade uses all four layers — your current HARMONICA.md, the active template, and the updated brief fields — to produce a new Facilitation Approach and Summary Generation. See Regenerating after edits for details on when to accept vs override.

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